Come Together

Circulation Management, July-August, 2008 by Patrick Hainault

In a beautiful late spring morning, two young friends entered the world of direct response marketing. Both had been better than average students, and both had ambitious dreams.

And both needed to decide how they’d reconcile shrinking creative budgets with demands for breakthrough direct response campaigns.

Here, the legendary “Two Young Men” Wall Street Journal acquisition letter would have our two friends take slightly different paths to achieve vastly different outcomes. One might decide that only working with famous (and expensive) copywriters and designers will do. After all, a lasting winner can be worth multiples of what it cost to produce and test.

The other, more thrifty (or shackled to a tighter budget), might decide to restrict his efforts to home-grown or bargain-price efforts, drawing inspiration from some of his swipe-file’s favorite hits. After all, why commit scarce resources to a package that’ll end up looking much like all the others and which, anyway, only has a lesser than 50 percent chance of winning?

Twenty-five years later, who might end up in the corner office? Neither if they fail to ask the right questions as they develop their plans–regardless of which creative strategy they favor. Here are two to get you started:

1. What are the underlying economics of this project?

This question is best answered by determining the yearly value of the control against which you will be testing versus the potential upside of each new test. To get there, start by assign ing an honest, reasonable probability that a new test might beat the control, and by how much. If the control is outdated, you may feel bold enough to ascribe a 50 percent chance of a win. By how much? That guesstimate is entirely up to you. You may give it a 30 percent chance of achieving a 5 percent lift and a 20 percent chance of a 10 percent lift. Hence, if the specific control you are trying to beat generates $50,000 in profit per year, and if you think you could hold on to a new winner for at least three years, you better not put out a test that costs more than $5,250 (3 years * $50,000 * (30% * 5% 20% * 10%)).

Factoring all test costs, if this little exercise doesn’t leave you with enough of a budget to afford a new, professionally designed package, skip the test altogether or do an in-house revamp of your existing packages. In the past few years, technology has radically brought down the cost and difficulty of making simple design changes–and writing your own copy has always been free.

2. What exactly am I trying to do?

The surest way to doom a test is to assign it a vague mission to “just beat the control.” Often, out of fear of losing assignments from busy (or sometimes lazy) clients, professional designers and copywriters proceed without creative briefs or formal reviews. That’s not doing anybody any favor. In fact, such briefs should be written before reaching out to anybody. Doing so will help you narrow down who should be commissioned for the work That’s because, despite their assertions, copywriters are rarely good at a vast range of endeavors
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